The present invention relates to a shopping basket, and more particularly to a shopping basket capable of attachment to a stroller or pushchair that can be folded up.
It is known to attach an article-holding basket to the underside of a seat portion of a stroller so that the basket can hold the items purchased.
In most cases however, such conventional article-holding baskets are secured fixedly to the stroller body, and cannot be detached therefrom and be carried by a person who does the shopping.
In addition, in the above conventional construction, the frame of the article-holding basket is formed by rigid barlike elements of metal or the like Therefore, it is difficult to flex (or curve) the basket longitudinally to fold it, and to fold the basket in a direction of the width thereof (i.e., to reduce the width). For this reason, in most cases, when the stroller body is to be folded up, the basket portion is folded into a flattened form and then is brought into a rest position where it is held in abutment with the rear side of the stroller body as the latter is folded up.
Recently, there has been developed a stroller of the type in which an article-holding basket is freely detachable from the stroller body. In this case, also, the article-holding basket is made of rigid synthetic resin or metal bars to provide a high shape-retaining ability so that the basket can perform fully the function of a container, as is the case with the first-mentioned conventional basket Therefore, the construction is so bulky that it is not convenient to carry the basket. In addition, the problem of the inconvenience of folding up the basket has not been solved.
To overcome the above difficulties, it has also been proposed to form a shopping basket with a flexible material. In this case, however, the article-holding basket cannot be flexed (or curved) in the direction of the length, and cannot be folded in the direction of the width to reduce the width. Therefore, such a basket still has the disadvantage that it cannot be folded up in response to the folding of the stroller.